The air transportation industry has experienced rapid growth in the past three and a half decades. The world commercial jet fleet has grown from approximately 3,000 aircraft in 1970 to more than 15,000 aircraft in 2005. Over that period, dozens of aircraft models were introduced into the market to become the mainstay for air transportation services, while other models were retired by newer and better products and eventually went out of service. Aircraft retirements and replacements are amongst the major factors driving demand for new aircraft.
Currently and in the past, there has been a problem of predicting the fleet of vehicles that are in service and the inventory of their spare parts. This is especially a problem in more expensive vehicles such as aircraft that are maintained longer in service as compared to lower priced vehicles such as automobiles.
There are no existing solutions for forecasting the retirements of the aircraft and the fleet composition of the aircraft. Especially, there is no existing forecasting technique that is able to predict the annual fleet size and retirements by the delivery year and/or operation type of the aircraft.
Airlines currently may make a rough estimate of what they need based on a very inaccurate means of estimation. For example, they may determine that a certain air vehicle is beginning to show its age, so they may allocate funds to cover maintenance of the air vehicle over future years, but may later discover that the aircraft is in proper working condition. Meanwhile they may have already ordered spares for the aircraft and/or discovered that it is another type of aircraft that needs spares for maintenance. Therefore, the airline may lose money by stocking more spares than necessary or not be able to accommodate for the spare parts for the air vehicles they do have in service because of an improper use of the resources available. The short period, such as a few months, of the forecast can cause problems, and the fact there is no exact methodology to the forecasting may lead to results that may be difficult to duplicate and may be prone to errors.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an apparatus and technique of forecasting the composition of a fleet of aircraft, aircraft retirements and fleet spares requirements in a controlled and efficient manner.